Alpha, Omega and All That

May 16, 2010
John 17:20-26; Revelation 22
Our opening hymn this morning is based on or inspired by those closing images of scripture, the last chapter of Revelation. Our closing hymn, though it doesn’t claim scriptural connection to the same text, strikes me as being about the same themes. Listen for them when we sing it and see if it strikes you the same way. The Revelation text is so imaginative and poetic that it’s little wonder a hymn writer would take it up.
The text from John, on the other hand … well, let’s just say that the closest I can think of to a hymn connection is from another John, Lennon this time, and it would be his, “I am you as you are me and we are all together … goo goo ga joob.” What do we make of the Johanine Christological formulation “I in them and you in me that they may become completely one”? Goo goo ga joob.
To begin with let’s stipulate a bit of textual history: it is highly unlikely that Jesus of Nazareth ever said these words. John is the latest of the gospels, written some 60-70 years after the death of Jesus. The Johanine literature’s high Christology – “I am the way, the truth and the life” and so on – likely reflects the theological convictions of a particular early Christian community during the period of strife and separation from the surrounding Jewish community after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and in a period of tremendous imperial violence. While John’s gospel is theologically crucial for Christianity, the text is not generally considered to present an historically accurate picture of the life of Jesus. Or, as has been said of so much of scripture, all of it is true and some of it actually happened.
That is a thumbnail of the currently predominant view of John. Of course, the text of John has been the subject of intense debate over its history, authorship, context and theology for more than a century, and today’s predominant view may be tomorrow’s minority opinion.
In other words, John presents a literature of conflict about which there remains considerable conflict.
All of which is more or less interesting for a Bible study but begs the question: what’s in it for us, for our lives and our situation right now? Moreover, how does the Johanine view of the gospel relate – if at all – to the vision of John of the Apocalypse in Revelation?
Step back in the gospel text just a bit and we’ll discover some insights – theological, spiritual, and anthropological – that can guide us here. Consider the various “I am” statements that John’s gospel attributes to Jesus. Set aside for now the scholarship that casts doubt on the historical accuracy of these statements and be open to their theological and spiritual truth.
When Jesus says, for example, “I am the way, the truth and the life” or “I am the bread of life” or “I am the light of the world” or “I am the good shepherd” the text is expressing theological and spiritual convictions, and, I would argue, it expresses theological and spiritual convictions more so than Christological ones.
That is to say, the “I am” statements intentionally echo the great “I am” statement that names God in Exodus. When God says to Moses, “I am who I am, I will be who I will be – that is my name,” God is expressing the absolute freedom of the divine will. God will be who God wants to be in and through whomever God chooses when and where God chooses.
If God decides to act through a muddle-mouthed murderer then Moses will become the great liberator to his people. If God decides to act through the life of an itinerant preacher in first century Palestine then God is going to do so and Jesus will become the anointed one of God. If God decides to act through a faithful young woman in medieval France then Joan of Arc will become, well, Joan of Arc. If God decides to act through a young African-American preacher in Alabama then Martin Luther King, Jr. will become Moses to his people.
Jesus’ “I am” statements reflect first and foremost the theological truth that God decides, that God is sovereign, that, ultimately, finally, God is in charge of history.
Moreover, these statements tell us something else that is essential to the nature of this sovereign God. God is essentially relational. If Jesus can be the good shepherd, for example, it is because of his relationship with God. Further, a shepherd is only a shepherd in relationship to those in his care. If you don’t have sheep then you’re not a shepherd. In the same way, if you don’t have darkness then you can’t be a light – if you don’t have a broken world lost in darkness then you have no need of a light.
Likewise, there is not much use in being “the way” if you do not have “people of the way.”
All of these statements are about relationship. They are about God’s loving relationship with humanity, about Jesus’ relationship of faithful obedience to God, and about Jesus’ relationship of loving service to those around him.
If you want to find yourself in relationship with God – in deep, faithful, loving, life-affirming, life-transforming relationship with God – then find yourself in the midst of this triangle of relationships faithfully obedient to God as revealed through the way of Jesus and faithfully serving God’s people just as Jesus did.
That is the heart of the mystical relationship that Jesus names in John 17. The theological truth is that God is first and last relational and that the truth expressed in the gospels is always expressed through relationships. Truth itself is relational – not relative, mind you, but also not static and abstract. Truth is relational.
The spiritual truth is that we are invited into relationship with God that we might discover in that relationship all of the truths upon which we ground and build faithful lives.
The anthropological truth is that we are also fundamentally relational beings. As God observes in the creation story in Genesis, it is not good for us to be alone. We cannot make it on our own. We need each other and we need something with which to fill the God-shaped holes in our hearts. We all have such holes.
So, of course, we fill them. We fill them with all the typical idols of this or any age: power, money, prestige or with the anesthetics peculiar to our own age: fame and celebrity, or with the chemical concoctions ancient or new age: alcohol to crystal meth.
That deep longing will not go away – it truly is from the alpha to the omega – and it will be filled. The question is, simply, with what?
The texts this morning invite us, more than anything else, into fulfillment – into a relationship that gets to the heart of the matter and to the hole in our hearts. The heart of the matter is not about believing the right and orthodox proposition about God, about Jesus, about the church. The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.
And the only question that really matters is this: who will you trust with your heart?
Jesus invited those who gathered around him to trust him with their hearts, but not only that, he also invited them to trust one another with their hearts and to ground all of that trust in an utter reliance upon the grace, mercy and love of God.
Such trust seems hard to come by these days, but it is not impossible. “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one,” is not some obscure, almost Gnostic philosophy it is, in fact, a description of moments and experiences in our lives that assure as that “the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” dwells among us and within us.
I have experienced such moments, and you no doubt have as well. Years ago – 28, to be precise – I was leading a group of two dozen or so teenagers on a 25-mile trek on the Appalachian Trail along the spine of the Blue Ridge.
One of the kids, a 15-year-old named Jeff, was a bit slow – physically and cognitively. It was a really great group of kids, but it was a group of kids and Jeff was never going to be the central concern of the group, never going to be the “cool kid,” never going to be the leader. This was, after all, the kid who did not get the running joke that began when, in the first week of our month-long experience together, the group “kidnapped” the camp’s director and demanded as “ransom” free passage via helicopter to the Grand Canyon for a raft trip down the Colorado River. Five days before the end of camp, as our final planning session for the four-day hike concluded the evening before we headed to the mountains Jeff grabbed me and asked, in all seriousness, “does this mean we’re not going to the Colorado River?” That was Jeff, the same kid who, for two days on the James River spoke to me, his canoeing partner, about the various kinds of athletic shoes then on the market. He really could have concluded his soliloquy with, “I reckon that’s all there is to know about the tennis shoe bidness.”
That was Jeff, and on the trail he was no different. In fact, on the third day out, on a straight-shot trail with five adults accompanying the group, Jeff managed to get turned around on the trail and we managed to lose him. This was long before the days of cell phones or walky talkies or GPS systems. We were deep in the George Washington National Forest, alone on the trail a half-day’s hike from anyone, and we lost a kid. At that point in its history, Camp Hanover was 25 years old. Never in its history had they lost a kid. Never since have they lost a kid.
Needless to say, when the five adults realized that Jeff was missing, and when the other two dozen kids realized that he was gone, something close to panic began to rise in our collective throats. We devised a plan that involved sending the two fastest hikers back along the trail at a run while the rest of us went on to our destination for that night – a shelter several hours further up the trail.
The main of the group arrived, set up camp, cooked dinner, asked God’s blessing on the food and on our lost camper, and waited as the darkness gathered around us. Where could they be? What might have happened to Jeff? To the two leaders who had gone back after him?
The answer to those desperate questions turned out to be quite simple. He’d turned the wrong way out of the lunch stop lookout spur trail and walked alone almost back to where we’d camped the night before before he realized his mistake and turned back around. He ran into the two leaders and the three of them double-timed it along the trail till, just past dusk, the trekked into our campsite.
All of which was enough excitement for one day, to be sure, but it transformed from a good tail to a holy moment when the rest of the kids broke into spontaneous, sustained applause and surrounded Jeff with genuine concern. I do not recall that evening an unkind word being spoken to Jeff about getting turned around, just continuous expressions of caring and thanksgiving and invitations to tell us all about it. Jeff was, at that moment and perhaps for only that moment, in the center of the circle, his heart held with care in our dirty hands, and while none of us would have put it this way we certainly knew in our souls that the spirit of the risen Christ was in our midst, that God was in that spirit, and that we had become completely one, our hearts entrusted to God alone.
If not delivered from the time of trial, we were filled with the strength and courage to meet it filled with grace and love. God with us, in us and through us at the time and place of God’s choosing – that is to say, in our time and this place. Is there anything else that we can ever ask for with which to fill the holes in our hearts? “I in them as you are in me that they may be as one.” Perhaps goo, goo, ga joob is just another way of saying, “amen.”